ng, involucre, matrix, or, as I might say, the _cotyledons_, by
means of which the latter is developed and nourished. Even in more
rational science this faculty, and these elements, necessarily recur,
since in every human conception we find the material aspect, or its
mental image, the thing and its cause, and, as we shall see, some
mythical personality is insensibly identified with it.

The act which produces myth is therefore the same from which science
proceeds, so that their original source is identical. The same process
which constitutes the fetish and myth also constitutes science in its
conditions and form, and here we find the unique fact which generates
them both; science, like myth, would be impossible without apprehension,
without the individuation of ideas, and the classification and
specification of types.

Before going further I must briefly recapitulate the order of ideas and
facts which we have observed, so that the process may be as strictly
logical as it is practical. Since, in the elements of apprehension,
perception is absolutely identical in man and animals, its primitive
effects in animating natural phenomena are the same. But man, by means
of his reduplicative faculty, retains a mental image of the personified
subject which is only transitory in the case of animals, and it thus
becomes an inward fetish, by the same law, and consisting of the same
elements as that which is only extrinsic. These phantasms are, moreover,
personified by the classifying process of types, they are transformed
into human images, and arranged in a hierarchy, and to this the various
religions and mythologies of the world owe their origin. Since such a
process is also the condition and form of knowledge, the source of myth
and science is fundamentally the same, for they are generated by the
same psychical fact. It is in this way that the progress of human
intelligence was developed in the course of ages; its attitude varies in
various races, but the impulses, the faculty, and its elements are
identical. I do not think that this unique fact in which myth and
science have their source has been observed before; still less has any
one defined the limits of human intelligence, and recognized in the
simple acts of animals the formal and absolute conditions of human
science, and the origin of myth.

If I am not deluded by a prejudice in favour of my own researches, this
theory is a contribution to truth. It is confirmed by the s